Effect of age on clinical hearing aid evaluation results.

A retrospective analysis of clinical hearing aid evaluation data was done to examine the aided and unaided speech discrimination ability in quiet and in noise across five age categories. The subjects, ranging in age from 30 to 90 years, 20 in each decade, were matched for degree and slope of sensorineural hearing loss. There were no statistically significant differences in aided or unaided speech discrimination scores in quiet or in noise among the different age groups. Phonetically balanced word list scores in noise showed significantly greater improvement than those obtain in quiet.